No Comfort in Comfort Shoes

 I see these shoes all over now. My demographic is big and booming so we drive the market for all kinds of consumer products. And now every women’s store offers “Comfort Shoes.” They are sold through catalogs like, Modern Maturity and All About You, which are supposed to be celebrating your mid-life. But I’m also seeing these shoes at Bloomingdales and dear God, even Saks.   There are all kinds of euphemistic names for these shoes like On the Move  or Comfort Footwear, but ya know what? These are old lady shoes. 

A friend brought a catalog to our lunch date to show me a pair of these comfort shoes that she was considering buying for a special event. “They look so comfortable” she says, “but are they too dowdy?”  How do I answer that without hurting her feelings? I look at the shoe and I say to my friend, “Maybe go for something a little more strappy; you don’t have to walk in them.” But what I really want to say is, “Those are shoes for a woman who has forgotten what her vagina is for.” 

Yes, I know that these shoes feel comfy but it’s a slippery slope. One day you allow yourself to wear these “comfort shoes” and within a week you are buying a pink jogging suit decorated with gold emblems, and thinking, “Oh, that looks nice.”  Or you buy a pair of  shoes with these “manmade breathable uppers” and “soft rubbery soles” and soon after you are thinking, “Why pay all that money for someone else to put color on my hair; I could just buy a box of that hair dye that Sarah Jessica Parker uses. She always looks so nice.”  

Maybe it really is about chemistry: You buy a pair of comfort shoes in a “nice, practical” navy or worse, in ivory, and after a few wearings the chemicals from the shoes enter your bloodstream and soon you begin to think that pants with an elastic waist make perfect sense. I mean, after all, you gain a little weight now and then so wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t need to buy new pants every time you gain a few pounds?

Or you begin to think that you don’t really need to buy new underwear every year. You could just buy one of those “bra extenders” and get more life out of your old bras. Did you ever really go to the hospital and have someone see your raggedy drawers? No, of course not.  

It all begins with the shoes.

Guard yourself and help your friends too. Comfort shoes are a frightening thing. They are the end of sex and the end of independent thought. In comfort shoes you will give up reading new fiction and listening to public radio. You will soon claim that you don’t know who Arianna Huffington is and you will think the red string on Madonna’s wrist is to remind her to buy a birthday card for her mother. When we talk about end of life issues—we are talking about comfort shoes. 

So I have this special request: When I am going to be buried or even if I am going to be cremated, please do not put “comfort shoes” on my feet. You can go with gold sandals, even a simple Ferragamo pump if you have to, or rubber thongs. Because wherever I go from here, it’s still about putting my best foot forward.

Searching for Thomas Merton in My Handbag

I have a favorite handbag that I’ve carried for years. It is perfect. It holds my files, journal, two kinds of pens, note cards, makeup and money. I love this bag. It cost less than $100. But when I go to New York City I fondle designer bags.  I pet the suede, calfskin and dyed canvas trimmed with leather. One of these bags costs as much as a car payment. But I want one. It’s lust. 

Then at home I look at the books piled on my coffee table, bedside table and desk. Books about personal growth and making a better life and having a spiritual connection and at the top of the pile: Thomas Merton—monk, philosopher, writer.  He had some things I want too: a life of contemplation, simplicity and, oh yes, renunciation.

How do I reconcile these competing and conflicting desires? What is a human to do?  Some of us are dashing around the mall wearing our name off our credit cards and others smugly announce they’re, “Making do with less” this year. I want both, always both.

Consumerism is based on the belief that problems have material solutions. We do it with bigger cars, bigger houses, bigger jobs. But we also do it by consuming more spirituality, trying more spiritual practices or teachers or even religion as “products” to fix our lives.  

Count me in: yoga mat, meditation pillow, charms, chimes, statues, wall hangings, a necklace—gold, expensive—to announce my belief in God. Even recovery jewelry. I buy more things to proclaim my belief in simplicity.

Yes, we all use consumption to create our identity. But it’s equally flawed to create a self-image based on refusing to participate in the dominant culture or by disdaining those who do.  The fundamental error is the same: whether we derive our identity from consuming or from not consuming we’re still focused on self.  Spiritual wanting is still wanting. 

How perfect that it’s a bag I’m craving now. I can look in my handbag—literally a sack to carry my identity—to see who I am. It holds my driver’s license, medical cards, reward

cards for the stores I shop—my cell phone address book displays the details of what and who matters. But I still think the outside of this bag—calfskin would be nice—will change the inner me.

As recovering women, we live at the intersection of spirituality and consumption. Could we choose peace in our hearts and at the mall? I am searching for Thomas Merton in my handbag and hoping for peace in my very human heart.

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More on recovery, shopping and style in "Out of the Woods" published by Central Recovery Press.

So Sari--A New Me

After years in recovery—teamed with years in therapy-- you can begin to believe that you have a handle on yourself. You might start to think that you are onto your own tricks. And then...

Here is the latest peek at myself. I love handbags and about a month ago in a chic, high-end catalog I saw a tote bag that was described as being made from old Indian saris—those traditional long wrap dresses that Indian women wear. The photos showed the bags in vibrant colorful prints and each had a long leather strap that could be worn across the body.

They were only $98. Of course that’s over $100 with tax and delivery, but I had paid much more for other handbags and there was something about the soft fabric of the old saris; I mean it would have some other—older Indian—woman’s karma right? And for spring/summer I could envision this soft bag across my body with khaki skirts or jeans and sandals. A nice look.

So I ordered the bag. The website said it would take seven days. I told myself, “Expect it in ten. I was already trying hard to manage my desire. So I wait the week and three days. I pass up other purses when I shop, “Nope, the old sari bag, slouched just so across my body, with its soft silk and aged leather…I can feel it all –I was living that new bag and UPS hasn’t arrived yet.

But then it does. I come home to “the box”. It’s here! I’m excited. But then I open the box and there is a lumpy, kind of laundry-bag looking sack. It is made of old fabric yes, but the bag is huge and droopy, and the strap is cheap, shiny leather.  I sling it across my body and I recognize the look. I demonstrate for my husband: I bend and scoop, bend and scoop. It looks like the kind of cloth sling that women wore to work in the fields. This is not chic, not cool, not very nice. It has no Karma. I’m disappointed.

But it’s what happens next that surprises me. I know that I don’t want THIS bag, and I want my money back. That is clear. My husband says, “Send it back and get something you like.” Yes, of course. That makes sense, but something is holding me back. I try on the sari cloth bag again. I empty my current handbag and put all the contents into the new sari bag hoping that somehow having my things inside will transform this purse into MY purse. Nope. It just looks even droopier now--like an old laundry bag. 

So what’s holding me back? It’s not until I am filling out the return form and packing the sari bag in the return carton to that I realize what my trouble is. It’s not just the bag I have to return, it’s the new identity that I’d constructed in my head. In the ten short days from ordering the bag to receiving the bag I had created a new me to go with the bag: I was going to be causally chic, I was going to be the kind of woman who wore old sari cloth with khaki and denim and simple sandals, I was going to be the slightly bohemian, somewhat hippy-ish chick, that tossed a bag like this across her body and…and…

And what? Maybe I imagined that I’d laugh more, worry less, be more comfortable in my body. I’d sit in coffee shops and I wouldn’t sweat the small stuff.  I’d be at peace and love stillness and be relaxed. And I'd be wise. In my shoppers imagination this sari bag was going to bring that to me. In ten days I had created a new me and done a kind of geographic cure without even leaving my house.

And then the UPS man took my bag and delivered reality right back to me.

Shopping and God

I pray and I shop. I shop and I pray. I pray about my shopping. I shop to help me pray.

Yes, that last bit is true. I buy books on spirituality and prayer. I have crosses and spiritual jewelry, Buddha necklaces, bracelets of sacred beads, OM necklaces. I have a library of self-help and spiritual books, statues of Mary, beautiful posters and paintings. And twenty-five Hermes scarves.

At Kripalu and Omega we are in workshops. We are giving up, we are letting go, we are embracing the nothingness, we are shedding our need to consume, we release our materialism. We fold up our pillow and replace our black canvas “Backjack” chair and we are congratulating ourselves on our new freedom from needing things. It’s OK, I can live with what I have.

And then we are hitting the gift shop like we are starved people in a grocery store. Necklaces, books, bracelets, scarves, rubber mats and CD’s. We can’t get enough.

I have spiritual practices: prayer, meditation, sacred reading, chanting, twirling and yoga. And I have shopping practices: a new budget, spend more in cheap stores, spend only in good stores, imitate the French women, imitate the poor, only buy thrift and consignment, care more, care less.

For a year I have practiced “One In-One Out”—meaning that everytime I bring home a new item a like item has to go out. If I buy a new skirt I have to give away a skirt, boots for boots, shoe for shoe. Only underwear and sox really wear out. This “One In-One Out” practice is hard. I have to think. Sometimes it gives me regrets. Something’s got to go. Sometimes, but not often enough, it stops me when I’m in a store: “Am I willing to give something up for this?” And sometimes I’m surprised that I can easily toss what was so needed, so necessary, just a month ago. What does that tell me?

There’s an emptiness when I want to shop. If I get quiet in a store I can feel it. When I think that the bracelet or the boots will do something for me it’s the same emptiness that calls for cake, bread, red licorice or an extra serving of pasta. That same part of me that used to call for a Long Island Iced Tea, a Kahlua and Cream, a glass (or three) of wine. It is the same deception, the same wheedling voice that says, “This one, this one, yes, this one will make you feel better.” And truly deceptive, “If you get this one you won’t need another.”

What if I just stayed with that emptiness? What if I just sat still and allowed that feeling to cover me? What if I let it wrap itself around me the way I would wrap that pretty infinity scarf around me again and again? If I just stayed with that feeling where would it go?

Isn’t that the very issue: the fear of where it might go? We tell people in AA “Sit still and feel”, we advise in OA, “Sit on your hands”, we tell the lover of the married man, “Give someone else your phone, do not text.” We say to anyone with an addiction, “Move a muscle, change a thought.” And, “Feelings are not facts.”

Does this wise advice apply to shoes, boots and beautiful bags? Does it include the nearly perfect, leather, cross-body messenger bag I saw today?

Well, does it?